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Bursting to life amid the dreary black-and-white melodramas of English picture theatres, Len Lye's hand-painted film A Colour Box (1935) made quite an impression. This hugely influential New Zealander gave birth to some of the first multimedia orphans; part-paint, part-celluloid and, in the narrow terms of their day, neither film nor art. Starting life without proper homes to go to or schools to belong to, they have grown up to be perpetual adolescents, claimed as the world's first music videos and now the denizens of YouTube. This article looks at Lye's work and its legacy - direct or otherwise - for a small yet stylistically diverse number of artists working with the moving image.

As a pioneer investigator of the art of motion, most successfully in a series of 'direct' experimental films made without the use of a camera and in a later body of kinetic sculptures, Len Lye (1901-1980) is now claimed as one of New Zealand's greatest artists, yet he was virtually unknown at home until the twilight years of his life. In London and later New York he was acquainted with many of the key literary and artistic figures of his day yet remained a maverick, an outsider whose work never fitted neatly into any one particular 'ism'. Perhaps this outsider status is precisely why he has become a touchstone for so many contemporary practitioners...

The tension between a photo-cinematographic it-was-there (in historical space and time) and the unfolding moving-image present (space and time) is radically dramatised by the contemporary work of Daniel Crooks, winner of the 2008 Basil Sellars Art Prize. In an impressive ongoing series of high-definition videos Crooks fundamentally re-pictures our understanding of time using a technique he calls 'time slicing'...

Crooks's slices allow him to play time like an accordian, stretching and compressing it so that across the screen in a single frame might be several seconds of recorded time. Time made malleable and represented pictorially, Crooks's results are like a psychedelic demonstration of Einstein's theory of relativity; light bends, causing buildings and people to be smeared across time...

Lye's filmmaking created an iconography that drew heavily on a generic and abstracted treatment of indigenous art forms. He would first record the soundtrack - something strongly rhythmic, often modern dance or jazz tracks - and would then match the imagery to it. Percussive sections would call for repetitive circular forms. A brass line would suggest a profusion of leaping vertical lines. The jumping chorus line of scratched light in Free Radicals (1979) is summoned by a field recording of the African Bagirmi tribe.

Lye's primitivist appropriations and conceptual framework look pretty rickety by contemporary standards, making them vulnerable in 1994 for an affectionate re-appropriation by Veronica Vaevae, a young New Zealander of Cook Islands heritage. In Mix That Scratch Vaevae made a direct film by photocopying tapa patterns onto adhesive tape and fixing these on clear film. The funky visuals were matched to a DJ scratching - a pun on Lye's Free Radicals scratch technique. The film remains something of a minor post-colonial masterpiece and was widely exhibited at the time...

Looking for ways to expand her work outwards from its set of cultural signifiers, in 2007 Auckland-based artist Sriwhana Spong turned to her regular medium of Super-8 film and wondered what might be the simplest possible image she could make. She produced a direct film called Beetlejuice by taking a hole-punch and excising the middle of every frame of a strip of black film. The hand-staked gesture resulted in a nervous jumping sun of white light with rough hairy edges marking the punch's bite through the filmic material; Lye would surely have approved of its raw energy. More camera-less works followed that reintroduced Spong's themes of cultural filtering, memory and subjectivity while continuing the examination of filmic materiality...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2009 issue.